VA hammered on treatment delays

Even as the Veterans Administration continues to staff up to meet soldiers' behavioral health needs, an internal report found that VA managers were gaming the numbers on treatment delays.

Somewhere, somehow, I'm sure that some of the thousands of veterans who are coming home now are getting the behavioral healthcare they need at Veterans' Administration hospitals. After all, the VA has been hiring behavioral health professionals at an aggressive clip for a year or two now.

But whatever good these people are doing "on the ground" with veterans appears to be overshadowed by local facility directors so eager to demonstrate that they were "meeting the numbers" for prompt treatment of veterans' behavioral health problems that they "gamed" the system, says a current article in the Washington Post. And for that, they caught heck from legislators on the heels of an internal VA report that identified and condemned the practice and even from VA staffers, at least one of whom was angry enough to quit.